Elephants.

There's less to write about on the beekeeping front at this time of year so I thought I'd post about a recently reported bee story - well, it was that or write another book review.

The problem with elephants, well one the problems with elephants, is that they need to eat. And on account of having very inefficient digestive systems they need to eat an awful lot, we're talking between 140 and 270 kg of food in a single day -it says so right there on wikipedia. The problem with people is they also need to eat, and whilst they don't each as much as elephants there's a lot more of them.

Over in sunny Africa this has caused numerous problems with elephants raiding farmland to eat crops. Not much irritates a farmer more than finding a three and a half ton migratory pachyderm and it's clan chomping away on his crops. It also isn't really that great for the elephants with them being chased off, pepper sprayed and sometimes shot. The stresses of these confrontations lead to stressed elephants and can result in displaced people. Of course this is just one of many problems caused by the overpopulation of humans all over the planet and their effect on the ecologies we live in but I don't imagine that anybody is about to cull our species,  return farmland to nature and limit our population growth so another solution is needed.

Enter stage right zoologist Dr Lucy King and her team of ..er.. other zoologists or whatever. They've developed a way to defend crops from elephants that doesn't involve human/elephant confrontations. Well done Lucy! It turns out that although honeybees can't sting though the skin of an elephant  they can deliver a nasty sting to the inside the animals trunk, unsurprisingly this means bees scare the bejesus out of elephants. So Lucy's team proposed using beehives to fence off farmland.

Great plan. Along comes Babar the bull elephant thinking to himself "I'm feeling a mite peckish, and I do believe there is a field full of ripe sugarcane just over yonder." He then saunters over to have a sweet feast. Normally he'd get to a fence, break through it and eat his fill. However, unknown to Babar this wire fence has a beehive dangling off it and his efforts to gain entry are seriously annoying it's residents. Out boils a horde of angry bees and Babar flees the scene leaving the field unscathed.

The award winning project was piloted on 17 farms in Kenya and succesfully turned away 31 out of 32 attemped elephant incursions. Now it's also being implemented in Tanzania and Uganda. Another benefit to the farmers is suddenly there's a lot of honey being produced which means more income for them which is an incentive to install the bees instead of more elephant guns. I assume it also makes their fences last longer now they don't have elephants flattening the things. I'm somewhat surprised this wasn't discovered and implemented locally as apiculture and elephants have both been in Africa for a long time. Perhaps the beekeepers and the farmers never thought to compare notes. But then I must admit I hadn't really given any thought myself as to why I've not seen any elephants in my own garden since the arrival of the bees either.

Filtering Beeswax

Hold on to your hats, there's pictures of pans in this entry!

Having extracted a load of beeswax I needed to filter it to clean it up a bit -to remove any bits in there and make it look a little nicer. The wax I had extracted actually had very little detritus in it but some smaller bits had managed to make it through the grid of the Easi-Stem. My plan was to melt it then pour it through a filter into a mould to make a nice yellow beeswax block.

Someone on a bee keeping forum said he'd managed to filter his beeswax by pouring it through a layer of kitchen roll. I have kitchen roll so I decided to do that too. It's in the kitchen which is handy as that's where the cooker is and I'll be using that too. Wax is flammable stuff. That's why candles work. So melting in on the flame of a gas cooker isn't the safest thing to do. Instead you need two pans. A big one and a less big one. You put your boiling water in the first pan and then pop your less big pan with the wax in it into this. Apparently this arrangement is called a bain-marie which I unless I'm mistaken is French for "Hey, let's use two pans instead of one!"

Hey, let's use two pans instead of one!

It's not a great plan to use the pans you prepare food with to faff about with beeswax so I used an old pan that's been kicking abut in a cupboard since my student days for this. It's non-stick or it was originally anyway but a few years of student life in the days before I was any good at cooking has scratched away a lot of that teflon coating, however I don't think it's going to matter hugely. So with the water boiling in the large pan the wax melt merily in the smaller one.

Once it was melted I then pulled out another pan dedicated for wax use. This was a saucepan from B&M I'd bought specifically for the purpose. It was cheap, like everything at B&M. It's also non-stick. Onto this pan I popped a seive that hadn't been used before -possibly bought in error some time ago. Lined the seive with a piece of kitchen roll and stuck the lot in the oven to warm it up. I then poured the wax into the kitchen roll and popped it back the oven on a low heat to stop it cooling as it filtered through.

Once this was done I poured the wax into some child's baking moulds from Hobbycraft.

Some of these images are a bit unecessary really

And let it cool. I did wonder how I was going to get the cooler wax out of the moulds but after cooling I found flipping them over and giving them a bang made the wax drop straight out in a block that looked a lot like toffee.

There were a couple of points where I lost some wax during the process, one was when I accidentally got water into the bain-marie and decided to bin the wax and water in it and the other was when I knocked the bain-marie and spilt wax into the water. Oops. What I ended up with was 1650g of wax in blocks and a 428g foil container of wax I'm giving to a mate who's going to use it to make some guitar polish or something.

One lump or two?

I had originally planned to swap the wax for new foundation for next season but now I'm thinking I might have a go at making some furniture polish from this as that seems relatively simple (famous last words) and I can possibly flog a bit of it or perhaps give it to people as one of the world's crappest xmas gifts ever. Being a waste not want not kinda guy the kitchen roll I used to filter the wax got torn into strips or quarters and scrunched up into balls. These make good fire lighters and will be handy when I next decide to fire up the barbie or chiminea.

128g block of Beeswax

Extracting Wax

Back in September I extracted the honey I'd harvested earlier by cutting the comb out of the frames then crushing and straining it. This left me with a load of frames with a lot of wax stuck to the edges as well as honey and propolis. Not enough propolis or honey to be particularly useful to me but the wax I can certainly use. Next year I'll be needing new foundation for the supers and some of the manufacturers have exchange schemes whereby you give them your wax and they exchange it for new foundation. Some people make their own foundation from their reclaimed wax, others use it to make candles or beeswax polish -actually that looks fairly simple so I might give it a whirl at some point, I'm sure I can find a use for it. Another use for the wax is treating the wood of the bee hives -you melt the wax and pour it on, it's bee friendly and waterproofs the wood. My housemate tells me some people apply beeswax to dreadlocks which strikes me as a great way to attract bees to your noggin. 8^O But whatever rocks your boat. Once at a party I had a go on a didgeridu. The mouth hole had a circle of beeswax on it that you could reshape to fit your mouth. There you go. Another use for beeswax that few of us can imagine being without.

So I've got these grotty frames asnd I want to reclaim the wax stuck from the edges of and I've also got 3 supers worth of shallow frames complete with comb from an auction that've been sat in bin bags since my buying them at a clearance auction. The wax from these frames I can't let my bees come into contact with because they're from another apiary and there's always the chance they may harbour some bee disease or virus which could get passed on to mine. It's also for that reason you shouldn't ever give honey to wild bees btw, no matter where you bought it.

So how to remove this wax then? Well I could spend a few hours carefully scraping off what I can and melting and straining it. But I won't. I'm a busy chap with things to see and people to do. What I did with the frames that came with the first hive was boil them in hot water then pour the water and molten wax into a bucket, as it cooled the wax which had floated to the top solidified into a disc which I was then able to remove, melt again and strain through cheesecloth. It worked okay and I did a similar thing with the remaining squashed wax from the honey extraction. It was a pain cleaning the wax and other crap from my large pan afterwards though so I don't plan to repeat that exercise. I've recently acquired a steam wax extractor, specifically a Thornes 'Easi-steam' -actually it's half an easy steam as I decided not to buy the steam generator seen as I already have a wall paper steamer and figured I could use that. Bee keepers are a thrifty lot.

The unit is basically a metal floor with a sort of spout bit on one side and a metal grille above that to catch any bits of crud, then there's an 'eke' (think of it as a quare empty wooden frame) to raise the box above a couple of inches from metal floor, and a metal roof skin with a hole in it that has a nozzle for a steam hose to attach to. You place a national wooden floor below the metal floor and a national super or brood box with all your grotty frames between the roof and the eke. The steam melts the wax and it runs out of the spout bit into your receptacle -in this case poundshop aluminium food containers -8 for a quid. Good Plan Batman!

I hauled out my steamer and discovered the hose end didn't really fit the Easi-steam's connector. Bugger. So a minute with some snips and I'd removed the offending thread from the steamer's hose, a few more minutes and a trip to the hardware shop on Chanterlands Avenue and I'd secured it with cloth tape and cable ties. Ace. 8-D

Cloth Tape and Cable Ties hose modification

Next problem was the floor I'd got with my initial hive, ordered via eBay from some idjit in Driffield, turned out to be the wrong size. It's commercial sized on the outside but the batons making up the sides are too wide for the tray doesn't sit in it properly it. If it'd been correctly made to either Commercial or National measurements I'd've been fine but that's the kinda chance you take if you buy things on eBay from people who use lots of capital letters and exclamation marks in their listings. Using a few random bits of wood to plug gaps I was able to bodge it anyway. I could've just made a new floor, it's not really rocket science afterall -seriously it's only three sticks and a square, and I think that'll be the plan next time I use it.

Easi-Steam Floor

I added the super -a Thornes super I'd bought unassembled from another eBay user. I figured different manufacturers probably have a few millimeters difference in size tolerance so go with the same and I should be fine. Although the super was cedar wood I'd painted the outside a rather natty shade of green Shed & Fence paint to match the hives and the rest of the boxes.

Easi-Steam Floor with Super and some sticky shallow frames

I loaded the super with sticky shallow frames that've been cling filmed and boxed up in the dining room since September's honey extraction, turned on the steamer and popped the metal lid on.

I mean tried to pop the metal lid on. Removed the metal lid, turned it 90 degrees and tried again, removed it again and tried refitting it a number of times. Went to the shed dug out the rubber mallet I used when I laid the patio a few years back and with a few carefully aimed and gently applied wallops managed to get the lid on properly. When Thornes said the lid fitted snugly they weren't kidding. Actually after doing the first batch I found the lid easier to remove and replace than before so the problem might've been that it'd contracted due to the cold and having warmed up it'd expanded again. In use the contraption has quite a steampunk feel to it with wood and metal surfaces, a hose and, of course, steam coming out of it. A bit of Raspuina playing in the background wouldn've been just the right audio accompaniment to the bubbling and dripping.

Easi-Steam in use

It worked a treat. within minutes there was some very clean pale yellow wax dribbling out of the spout into my foil food tray, accompanied by some brown looking water but TBH not as much water as I'd exected. I'd started in the early evening and as the temperature dropped the wax started to set on the spout and stopped coming out. Next time I'll do it earlier in the year whilst the weather's warmer, in the meantime I finished extracting the following day whilst the sun was up and it was still warm, I also did the second hand shallow frames too before sterilising them.

Loading up with used frames

The first thing I noticed about using the Easi-steam was the odour. It smelt fantastic. The super I used was made of cedar which normally has a fairly pleasant but faint odour to it anyway but with the heat and steam going through it the aroma was really strong and really pleasant -actually it was a lot like a sauna but without the unpleasant knowledge that all the wooden seats are steeped in other peoples' sweat. Nice :) The second thing I noticed was the wax dribbled out and cooled it looked like a fried egg with the molted wax in the middle and the paler set wax at the outer edges. The third thing I noticed was that the steam partly melted the plastic runners on the super, so next time don't use plastic runners. They cost almost a pound per pair so obviously I'm pretty devestated about that particular faux pas. The other thing I noticed was that not long after firing up the steamer a few bees came to investigate probably drawn by the smell of wax. They didn't stick around long enough to be a nuisance.

Molten Beeswax

Get Started In Beekeeping

The first book I read about Beekeeping was Get Started In Beekeeping  written by Adrian and Claire Waring, from the Teach Yourself series. The Teach Yourself books cover pretty much everything from learning widely spoken languages such as Bulgarian and Tagalog to business skills like Project Management and Stand Up Comedy, so it's no surprise they have a book on beekeeping tucked in there.

Teach Yourself

Get Started In Beekeping eases you into the subject with, first, a one minute overview, written in large letters across two pages. This tells you in the briefest of briefness basically how a bee colony works. If you're still interested you can then read the five minute section which is two pages of normal size print. This tells you a little more about bees, honey and the approximate commercial value of beekeeping in the UK and the USA. At this point assuming you've not attracted the ire of Waterstones staff by brazenly standing reading a book you haven't paid for there's a ten minute section to read.

The ten minute section is three pages of text. The more mathematically able of you are probably thinking this doesn't add up. If two pages of text takes five minutes to read then surely three pages should equate to seven and a half minutes -maybe the Warings need to invest in a copy of Basic Mathematics from the same range. Anyway for the ten minute overview if you're in a Waterstones I suggest taking the book to the in store Costa franchise and ordering a great big latte, then grabbing a comfy seat and table. Then you can read the ten minute overview at your leisure as you sip that frothy combination of cow juice and the world's most popular addictive stimulant. The ten minute section tells you a bit more about what bees actually do and how they do it (hint: it sounds like "making money" has to do with "honey").

After this you've probably finished your latte and can either buy the book and take it home to bore your housemate with interesting honey bee facts or pop it back on the shelf, whip out your smartphone and order a copy from Amazon for just over a fiver -or try your luck with eBay the worlds biggest poundshop.

Written in 2006, this book does pretty much what it says on the metaphorical tin. It's got enough info to get you started in beekeeping, from how to hive your bees and keep them alive all year to harvesting the honey. At the end of each chapter is a section called "10 Things To Remember," whilst you might not remember them all they certainly make it easy to locate points again later on. The last part of the book is a glossary where you can look up things like gimp pins or tropilaelaps without having to wade through the text. It's written in a very accessible way packed with information and diagrams. There's also some colour plates in the middle of the book showing you things like bees, some more bees, another load of bees, a waxmoth larva, various bits of bee feeding stuff, even more bees, honey comb, a bee keeper, some parasites, some bee hives and oh it's another bee. Towards the end is a month by month breakdown of the beekeeping year. I'd reccomend this easy to read tome to anyone wanting to start beekeeping.

Mead

Having harvested a modest 11kilo of honey this year I needed something to do with it. I don't eat that much of the stuff really, sometimes drop a spoonfull in a jasmine tea, use a little in cooking and have the occassional honey sandwich but I'm not really going to use 11 kilos of the stuff in a year. I had planned to flog some of it but instead I've given away about half of it and figure I'll leave that venture till next year. This year I decided to make mead.

Mead is basically a fermented drink made from honey. People seem to think of it as a honey wine and I'm happy to go along with that. If I'm in York I occassionally buy a bottle from the Jorvik Centre. Apparently mead was a popular drink amongst vikings as any viking metal fan will attest -just go to a rock night and look for someone hairy drinking lager from a plastic cows horn, he'll tell you. A quick look on Wikipedia tells me that mead production seems to go way back to 7000 BC China. I gather it was a popular drink in Olde Englande and if I was going to make up a plausible sounding theory as to why from the top of my head, based on no research at all, I'd assume that the climate here is better suited to farming honey more than vinyards.

I did a little research on the net (where else?) and looked at a few mead recipes. From this I cobbled together my own recipe based more or less on what was to hand. Here's my mead recipe for your delectation:

Mead Recipe
Ingredients:
Roughly 1360g of honey
4 pints of water (and then more later)
1/2 teaspoon of allspice
1 cup of strong black tea
One peeled and mashed up orange
Yeast

Method:
Boil up the 4 pints of water with the honey, throw in the allspice and mashed up orange. Make you cup of black tea -I used 3 bags in a coffee cup for this, no messing about there, pour it into the mix, boil it for ages -well one hour at  least. Pour it into a sterilised Demijon. Realised there's loads of space in the demijon so boil up some more water to top it up. Let it cool. Throw in the yeast. Pop on the airlock and sit back. When the bubble slow to one per second or less filter it into bottles, slap a cork in and leave it a few months before drinking.

Why tea? The tea is added as a source of tannins. Apparently the tannins are important for flavour, given that tea didn't reach England till around the 1650's I'd assume something else was used for that -or maybe olde meade in the UK never had tannins at all.

Equipment you'll need are a Demijohn, an airlock, wine bottle, corks, something to sterilise the demijohn and bottles, funnel, something to filter the mead, you'll also need yeast. I got all the wine making stuff from Wilkinsons in town. The airlock sounds a little scientific but it's just a plastic tube with a u-bend in it that you add some water to, this lets ait out as the yeast releases CO2 but doesn't let it back in. It's simple but works.

So with my recently sterilised glass and plastic ware I boiled up the ingredients and popped it into the demijohn. It took a very long time to cool and eventually I resorted to running cold water over the sides of the demijohn to take the heat away. This seemed to do the trick and I added the yeast. About ten minutes later I touched the demijohn and found it still seriously hot though so I figured my using water to draw heat off had only affected the outer mead and the glass rather than cooling the whole lot. I suspect the heat will have kiled most of the yeast so after letting it cool I added some more. At this point it was too late to pop out for brewing yeast but a biology teaching mate who used to make wine and mead herself told me yeast is all prettymuch the same so some baking yeast I'd had in a cupboard for years got dropped into the mix, actually the proper name for the mix seems to be 'must' -now you can impress friends, family and colleagues with your knowledge of mead making jargon..

The 'must' promptly turned bright orange and started to bubble. I was quite surprised by the intense orange colour, it looked very chemically -like some kind of industrial waste or a kids drink from the 80's.

Fermenting Mead. It went the colour of Kia Ora.

I set it to ferment next to a windows where it would be warmed by the sun. After a week or so the colour calmed down. Whilst the mead was fermenting you could seeand hear bubbles passing through the water in the airlock. When the bubbles slowed to one buble per second or so it was time to remove it. There's different ways to do this, some people filter it into another demijohn to sit some people put it straight into bottles. I opted to bottle it. By the time fermentation had slowed there was a layer of dead yeast at the bottom of the container and I think it's this that you want to get the mead away from.

There's all kinds of clever filtery type stuff you can use and ideally the mead shouldn't be areated so the normal method seems to be to siphon it from the demijohn into the next stage. I decided to use coffee filters for this. I sterilised a plastic bottle to filter the mead into so I could then decant it into wine bottles later. Initially I used Melitta 1x2 micropore coffee filters simply because that was what I had to hand. However it took hours to filter thorough. I decided to get a second funnel and some Melitta Original 1x4 filters so I could have two loads of mead filtering at a time. The mead shot straight through these filters and came through all cloudy. So I used two of these filters at a time which worked rather well -albeit rather slowly. The process was so slow that I wound up filling the filters then putting clingfilm over the tops and around the bottle necks and leving them over night. It took literally days to filter my demijohn. I then decanted the now surprisingly clear mead into wine bottles and corked them. Obviously this way isn't ideal as the mead gets exposed to air which I gather isn't a good thing but it's new to me and seemed to work. Oh and apparently it's not called 'bottling' it's called 'racking' -I think people just make up terminology for the sake of it.

Hivemind and Me Mead

Looks pretty good doesn't it? For the first batch I used the very pale honey and for the second batch I used the darker stuff. In the second batch I also added Rooibos teabag to the tea just for variety -well it's good tea so maybe it'll be good mead. I sampled the meads whilst bottling -I mean racking- them and found the mead made from darker honey was very dry whereas the pale stuff was really sweeet. For the first batch I'd used plastic corks but my pal with the mead making knowledge advised me they're not always as good for keeping air out as a cork cork so for the second batch I acquired a corking tool (Wilkinsons again) and some corks made from trees. The real corks also look more aesthetically pleasing.

Mead

After racking the bottled mead is then place in a wine rack or someplace else out of the way for a few months to improve. I'm not entirely sure of the chemistry or biology involved in this ageing process but I gather that there may still  be some fermentation going on in the bottles if  any live yeast made it through the filtering but eventually the alcohol level will kill anything living in there, hopefully anyway. the bottles are meant to be stored on their sides to keep the corks damp -the wet cork expands, doesn't really matter with the plastic corks, and any sediment in the bottle will sink and adhere the the side of the bottle. I've noticed that more sediment seems to have made it into my first batch, I'm also not entirely convinced of the airtight seal of the plastic corks. In a couple of months time I'll give it a try and see how it's worked out.

Worker Bees

Green Hive Roof mk.II

When I first set up my hives I had the intention of giving them green roofs. I posted a blog about the green roof on Hive1 back in June 2011. It looked good, I'm pretty sure it insulated the hive below nicely, was aesthetically pleasing, helped my hive look a little less obvious to bee paranoid neighbours and even gave the hive proper a little more shelter from the rain. However it was heavy, especially after a rainfall. My solution was to replace the large box with two smaller ones. I was initially considering using aluminium as it's light weight and fairly strong. The two problemns there were I havn't got a clue who could make the items from aluminium and as someone pointed out on a BBKA forum plants don't fare too well in aluminium containers -possibly to do with heat and cold I guess.

Stage one. Not quite done yet.

I opted for a material I've used a little bit before and know where to source. Wood. Specifically gravel board, a treated peice of wood meant to go at the bottom of a wooden fence to protect the fence from the damp ground. I still don't have a decent work surface so once again I got out the mini vices and used a double hive stand weighted down with breezeblocks and a cat.

Stabilise wobbly worksurfaces with breezeblocks and cats as required.

With my still worryingly unstable worksurface I cut the boards to size. My plan was to have three sides of the box hanging over the edge of the metal roof skin and somehow magically join them together once the boxes were in place then unconnect them when I needed to remove them so I could lift of half a green roof at a time.

Testing the fit.

As you can see I used mortise and tenon joins on the corners and a handfull of nails to hold them together. What you can't see is I also used some wood glue on the joints and to hold the pieces together as they dried I used a few staples too. With my prototype green roof it had orignially had a solid marine ply floor but I quickly discovered it was too heavy and cut out most of the floor to leave a frame around the edge to support a two layer lightweight plastic floor. I decided to do the same thing with these to help keep the weight down. I figured I could just use one layer of correx on these as they're so much smaller too. Satisfied with the fit on the hives on the roofs I added a shelf along the long side of each box held in place with yet more glue and nails. Next step was painting the boxes to match the hives. I decided to cut a corner at this point and poured a few litres of shed and fence paint into a bucket then dipped the submerged box ends in using a brush to work the paint across the long sides that hadn't been submerged. It worked okay giving me a pretty good coat of paint. It was also incredibly messy and took days to dry. As the wood was already treated the paint was just an aesthetic touch really.

Green Roof boxes. They're now green.

On the shelves I put a single layer of correx board with the internal walls running the short distance across the gap for support. Correx is the type of plastic FOR SALE and SOLD signs are made of. You can buy the stuff, but if you're lucky you can sometimes find it in the street or in a skip. The black plastic liner was just an offcut of pond liner. I folded the liner into place and used brass drawing pins to secure it. Once they're filled with the growing medium and the plants the contents will hold the liner in place so I'm not too concerned about the pins falling out later in their lives.

I then had to give a little thought to how I was going to joing the boxes to keet them in place. In the end I got some hasps from B&Q, they were the priciest part of the project and I needed one per box. I glued them into place then used the supplied screws to secure them properly. There was nothing to secure the hasps so I just drop a nail into each which seems to work adequately.

Green Hive Roofs Mk.II

The last stage was to add the growing medium and some plants. Once again I opted for mostly perlite as it's lighter than soil, and planted a mixture of sedums, some rockery plants and a few other things I felt might survive in the green roof boxes -over the course of a year they'll probably experience flood and drought conditions. I also transplanted all the plants from the original roof garden into these. It's not really the best time of year for plants to be getting used to a new container but I figure nature will take care of it and whilst some of the plants will quite probably die back others should survive and grow to fill the gaps left. They look nice enough, as the perlite settled I added some vermiculite to the top. Regarding further development I may at some point think about adding a mechanism to allow running off excess rain water, but for now I shall wait and see how they fare.

Space board

In the last really exciting installment of The Hivemind and Me I wrote a bit about follower boards which provide a litttle insulation to help the bees make the most of their space in the brood box. As it gets colder the bees are going to need a little more insulation than that. Hot air rises so I think a little insulation on the top is called for. There's various options to choose from all with different rationales. For example the Warre Hive uses a cloth placed on top of the fames with a 'quilt' of wood shavings on top, whilst other people like to wrap up their hives in black insulation giving them a Pulp Fiction Gimplike look. Obviously what you opt to do depends by and large on where you are, for example a bee keeper in Kenya probably doesn't loose much sleep over winter snows, high winds and sudden drops in temperature whereas in Siberia it's possibly a little more relevant.

However I'm in neither Kenya nor Siberia but the North East of England, I can't ignore insulation but at the same time don't need to go overboard. What we normally use in our homes is a thick layer of fibreglass wool, more recently there's been various kinds of fibreglass and polystyrene insulation boards coming out too. It's a good idea to avoid added a surface which water can condense on when you're insulating a hive. I opted to use Knauf Space Board Loft Board Insulation which is a 52.5mm thick extruded polysyrene board giving insualtion equivalent to a 27cm thickness of glass wool. Part of my reason for using this is that it's good insulation but also with it being so robust I can just stick a square of the stuff on a crownboard and drop the roof back on top of it.

Knauf  Space Board.
Traditionally used by beekeepers since the dark ages.

Honest. Really.

I popped to B&Q and bought one board which was large enough to cover both hives with insulation to spare. I just cut out two squares using a long craft knife and a crownboard as size guide then cut out a rectangle in the middle the size of a chinese takeaway box. I then pulled out this smaller rectangle and cut in two pieces across the thickness so I have a removeable portion to allow winter feeding with sugar fondant which I can then place some insulation back on top of..

The problem with this stuff is when you cut it little crumbs rub off. I don't really fancy a garden covered in bits of orangey pink extruded polystyrene and don't think the bees particularly want a hive full of the stuff either. So out came the blow torch and with the lightest brushing of a flame all those little bits of polystyrene shrunk back into the main body.

I'm contemplating putting a thin polystyrene tile over the rectangular cut outs as some heat may escape from the cuts, there will be a ventilated 20mm gap between the top of the space board and the underside of the roof. In the case of these two hives I'll also be putting green roof boxes above the metal skins which will mean a little more insulation above the roof.

Follower Boards

Through the year I provide a little insulation to the bees in the form of follower boards at the front and the back of the hive. Their job is to provide a bit of insulation for the outer face of the frames facing them. Without them in place when you push the frames together in the middle of the hive you'd also have a large gap at either end and the queen might decide those areas are a little chilly for her royal sensibilities and decide not to lay eggs on the outer two faces of the brood frames.

Follower Board in Brood Box

These are just thin pieces of plywood cut to more or less the shape of a brood frame and dropped one at either end of the rows of frames.

Follower Board. You could train a monkey to make these.

The board reduces what would be a large gap at either end of the frames to a bee space on the side of the frames, and creates a seperate air gap between the board and the hive wall. Without the boards in place the bees produce burr comb in the gaps at either end of the frames but with them in place whilst they still have access to the gap behind the boards they seem to consider it to be outside of the hive proper and don't make any comb -just like the space above a crownboard.

Follower Boards in use

I suppose they're a little like secondary double glazing, except you can't see through them, they're in a beehive and nobody knocks on your door trying to sell you them.

Guards! Guards!

My garden is probably a fairly mouse friendly place (except for the cat) as I have two rather modest woodpiles in the rear corners which I added to give my frog populations somewhere to sleep and encourage other urban wildlife. The only thing that'd make my garden more friendly (except for removing the cat) would be to add a warm box of food for them to spend the winter in ..which is exactly what a beehive is. The well fed and slightly insulated hive has warmth and plenty food in the form of honey, bees and possibly wax, it's also fairly safe from predators (like the cat), and people are fairly unlikely to disturb the hive till Spring leaving the mouse to spend a happy winter on a high sugar diet.

How do mice get in? They just walk. If it's a cold night and the bees are all huddled up for warmth a mouse can just wander in unchallenged. You would expect a mouse in a hive to meet a fairly unpleasant death by multiple bee stings once the bees become a bit more active and start wondering who invited the furry thing that keeps peeing in the corner into their home, however, whilst I've never actually strapped a video camera to a mouse and encouraged it to enter a hive so I can see what happens, I'm told that once the mouse is in the hive the bees will ignore it completely.

So we want to keep the mice out of the hive. How do we do that? We add a metal mouseguard. A determined mouse can gnaw through a wooden entrance reducer so for this job we need something metal. As with everything else in beekeeping there's umpteen different kinds of mouseguards. What they have in common is that they should provide a metal barrier that the mice can't chew through and present some kind of access that allows the bees to go in and out but not the mice. Mice can squeeze though some fairly tight spaces dictated only by the size of their skulls. I decided to make my own mouseguards from wood and aluminium, they double as entrance reducers too so I put them in place when the wasps numbers rose in the hope that they'll make the hive entrances easier for the bees to defend.

Mouse Guards

The guards are just a wooden batton the size of the hive entrance with a piece cut out to allow bees to enter and exit. Over that I've put a piece of aluminium in which I've drilled holes through, I think I used an 8mm drill bit, should be enough to let even the drones leave the hive whilst not letting the mice in.

Bees using the MouseGuard

As you can see the bees are getting through the guards ok, there was a little confusion as they got used to the idea and it does slow them down a bit on a busy day -and given the bizzare bursts of warm weather we've been getting there have been some pretty busy days of late.

Just visible in the above image is the edge of the mesh that makes up the hive floor. Whilst it sounds a bit nuts to have an open mesh floor at the bottom of a hive over winter common consensus seems to be that the extra ventilation this provides is more useful than the extra insulation afforded by a solid wooden floor. Apparently what kills bees in the winter isn't cold but dampness and starvation. Whilst we feed them against starvation the ventilation of the open mesh floor should hopefully stave of the threat of damp.